Herewith, two pieces defending James Madison and his homestead, Montpelier, just as last week featured two column about the leftist assault on Thomas Jefferson and his homestead, Monticello. (To read each full column, follow the link embedded in each headline below.)
The woke Left is destroying Madison’s Montpelier (July 19): ….
…I wrote twice last week on how the forces of wokeness, obsessed with slavery and willfully dismissive of historical context, took over the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and turned Monticello into a grim spectacle of self-flagellation . The same agenda is at work, arguably farther along and thus worse, at Montpelier, where the misnamed National Trust for Historic Preservation operates more like an agent for historic destruction.
Take just one example. On Montpelier’s website as the official “Independence Day Message” — from 2020, mind you, as if it couldn’t be bothered to commemorate July 4 in 2021 or 2022 — is an outlandish paean to the “America is evil” ideology. ….
Nowhere in its Independence Day message — not in even a single word — is there mention of why we celebrate the Fourth of July. Not a word about self-evident truths expressing unalienable rights, not a word about consent of the governed, not a word about a sincere effort to appeal to “the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,” and certainly not even a backward glance at sacred honor.
This is a self-hating sickness. This is unacceptable….
My personal attachment to Madison and Montpelier (July 20): …
….On James Madison’s March 16 birthday in 2000, Investor’s Business Daily published a column of mine noting that one year from that day would be Madison’s 250th birthday. I opined that Congress should appoint a commission of scholars (unpaid) to help commemorate the 250th and use it as an occasion for civic education. I said the commission should sponsor or encourage high school essay contests about the Constitution, that the scholars should meet together at least once, and a few other things.
Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) saw my column and turned it into a bill directly tracking the column’s suggestions. It was one of the final bills passed and signed into law in the last Congress of President Bill Clinton’s tenure. Sessions gave me the original, official “Redline” copy of the bill signed by Clinton, Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Senate President Pro Tem Strom Thurmond. The scholars were appointed; they held a symposium in an ornate room in the Library of Congress on March 16, 2001, with me as the only reporter present for the private part of the session; and they promulgated a call for civic education. There was a grand dinner that night at a banquet hall in the Library of Congress honoring Madison, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Sessions presiding….
For me, it capped a day in which I had driven the 95 miles out to Montpelier, then only in the early phases of its restoration from what the DuPont family had done to alter it radically, and I enjoyed a fascinating private tour of all they were planning. The curators said the law creating the commission and the commemoration had hugely helped draw attention to Montpelier’s mission of celebrating the life and thought of the Father of the Constitution….
